Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture 9780822396529

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Dancing in Spite of Myself

DANCING

I N

S PIT E

o

F

MYSELF ESSAYS ON

POPULAR CULTURE

Lawrence Grossberg

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham & London 1997

© 1997 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Typeset in Melior by Keystone Typesetting. Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

If you prefer not to exaggerate,

you must remain silent, you must paralyze your intellect and find some way of becoming an idiot. -Ortega y Gassett The Revolt of the Masses

rontents ~

Acknowledgments

,

ix

Introduction: Re-placing the Popular

Dancing ... (Popular Music)

1

27

Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life (1984) 29 "I'd Rather Feel Bad than Not Feel Anything at All": Rock and Roll, Pleasure and Power (1984)

64

Rock, Territorialization, and Power (1991)

89

Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care? On "The State of Rock" (1994) 102

in Spite of , .. (Postmodernity)

123

The Indifference of Television, or, Mapping TV's Popular (Affective) Economy (1987)

125

viii Postmodernity and Affect: All Dressed Up with No Place to Go (1988) Postmodernist Elitisms and Postmodern Struggles (1990)

Myself ... (Politics)

166

189

"It's a Sin": Politics, Postmodernity, and the Popular (1988) Introduction 202 The Scandal of Cultural Studies

207

Patrolling Frontiers: The Articulation of the Popular Postscript: Fans, Fanatics and Ideologues 245 Rockin' in Conservative Times

191

192

The Specificity of American Hegemony

218

253

Conclusion: From Media to Popular Culture to Everyday Life (1991) Notes

285

References Index

301

293

145

270

i\

cknowledgments

There are so many people to thank. Some of them allowed me to borrow their ideas-and sometimes even their words (but as Nick Lowe was purported to have once said, "I only steal from the best"). Some of them allowed me to bounce ideas and words off them, and were good enough friends to not always bounce them back to me. Some of them stood by me and others told me when to get off. Some have laughed and danced with me, others have mourned and prayed with me, and many have done both. Some have held my hand, and some have patted me on the back. Some have thanked me, and some have gone on without saying a word. Some have gotten high with me, and some have shared my lows. But all of them have taught me something, and 1 hope that 1 am a better teacher for having been able to touch so many wonderful people. 1 cannot thank everyone. Many are there in the notes to particular essays, and although I know it is not enough, I also know it will have to do. My work and my life as a scholar and teacher have been shaped by three wonderful people, three of the best teachers/political intellectuals in the world: Stuart Hall, Jim Carey, and Meaghan Morris. 1 was fortunate enough to study with Stuart and Jim. And Meaghan has been what I used to call in graduate school a dialogic partner-every intellectual's dream. They have all been and remain more than friends and more than teachers. They have helped to shape my sense of myself as a political intellectual, and they serve as constant and powerful reminders of what an intellectual can and should be. They each continue to have an enormous impact on my work, even though I have moved in different directions, along different paths, over the past decade. They have influenced me more than I can ever say and I know that I will never find the words to express my gratitude to them. 1also need to thank

x

Catherine, Becky and Jesse, Betty, and Andre: they were all generous enough to let me into their lives, and they have become an important part of my life. I have been more than fortunate, over the years, to work with many wonderful graduate students. I have had colleagues and friends more supportive than I could possibly deserve: Chuck Whitney and Ellen Wartella (my other dialogic partner), Daniel and Barbara O'Keefe, Steve and Laurie Weidemier, Eleanor Blum, and James Hay. I left them all to move with my family to warmer (and more hospitable) places, and found colleagues and friends who made us feel at home: Della Pollock and Alan Shapiro, Bill Balthrop and Nancy Keeshan, Beverly Long (and Bill Long-we will miss him), Ken Wissoker and Cathy Davidson, Judith Farquhar and Jim Hevia, and more. I would also like to thank those people who supported my early efforts to think and write about popular music, including Richard Hoggart, Simon Frith, Dick Hebdige, lain Chambers, Angela McRobbie, Andrew Goodwin, Will Straw, Jody Berland, Marcus Breen, Van Cagle, Jon Crane, The Quaker, and others whom I met through the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and my undergraduate rock class. There are other friends, around the country and the world, that I want to thank, for many things: Tony Bennett, Henry Giroux, John Clarke, Paul Gilroy, Jennifer Slack, Marty Allor, Jan Radway, and all the rest of you (I hope you will forgive me for not trying to list everyone). Finally, I want to thank John MacGregor Wise for providing me with the title of this collection, and John Moran, for helping to dress me so well. I would not be who or what I am were it not for my parents and family, and I am eternally grateful to them (at least at those moments when I like myself). But in the end my life and whatever energy I have, whatever faith I have in myself and in the possibilities of a better world, rest with my wife, Barbara Anne Claypole White. Because she thinks I am better than I am, I am constantly trying to be what I can. (Thank you for loving me, and for putting up with me.) And there is my son, Zachariah Nigel Claypole White, born on Christmas Day 1994, named after the prophet who called for the rebuilding of the temple. He cannot yet read the words gathered here; he may never care enough to even bother. But he makes the future so much a part of my present, and he enriches my present so much every day. He has brought new meaning to my fears and rekindled my dreams. More than anything, I hope he will want to thank us for the world he inherits.

Acknowledgments

xi

I dedicate this book to Zachariah Nigel, and to Barbara, and to my mother, Miriam Grossberg, who has always stood by me. The essays in this volume originally were published as follows: "Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life" in Popular Music 4: 255-58 (with permission of Cambridge University Press); "'I'd Rather Feel Bad than Not Feel Anything at All': Rock and Roll, Pleasure and Power" in Enclitic, no. 8: 94-111; "Rock, Territorialization, and Power" in Cultural Studies 6: 358-67 (with permission of Routledge); "Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care? On 'The State of Rock' " in Tricia Rose and Andrew Ross, eds., Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth

Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994: 41-58); "The Indifference of Television, or, Mapping TV's Popular (Affective) Economy" in Screen, no. 28: 28-45 (wIth permission of Oxford University Press); "Postmodernity and Affect: All Dressed Up with No Place to Go" in Communications 10: 271-93 (with permission of Gordon and Breach Publishers); " 'It's a Sin': Politics, Postmodernity, and the Popular" in Lawrence Grossberg with Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys, and Paul Patton, "It's a Sin": Essays on Postmodernism (Sydney: Power Publications, 1988: 6-71); "From Media to Popular Culture to Everyday Life" in Metro, no. 86: 20-26. I am grateful for permission to publish these essays here, but I am especially grateful for the opportunity, however long ago, to publish them in the first place.

Dancing in Spite of Myself

Introduction: Re-placing the Popular

Too often the rise of cultural studies is automatically linked to the rapid growth of interest in the study of popular culture, as if cultural studies were somehow defined by popular culture. In fact, the two discourses are not the same nor even necessarily connected, although they have been articulated together in at least some discourses and networks. What remains unspecified is the precise nature of those articulations, the choices strategically made in specific contexts and enacted in specific critical practices. I want to use this question as an opportunity to reflect on my own work, since my project, begun over twenty years ago,1 can be situated here: between an interest in the social effects and logics of popular culture, especially rock music and youth culture, and a commitment to the possibilities of cultural studies as a form of progressive intellectual work. 2 On first glance, my work has followed four trajectories: a concern with the specific practice of cultural studies; a philosophical interest in cultural and communication theory; an exploration ofthe popularity and effectivity of rock music; and an investigation into the apparent success of the new conservative hegemony.3 In retrospect, these appear less as separable projects than as interconnected components of a larger and more pressing attempt to find a critical practice adequate to the challenges of understanding "the politics of the popular" in the contemporary United States, all the while recognizing that national contexts can no longer be so confidently isolated from the global circulations of people, power, capital, and culture. By the "politics of the popular," I do not mean merely the political inflections of particular texts nor the relations of such texts to ideological positions, subjectivities, or pleasures. Rather I mean to point to the intersections of popular culture, popular politics (or political identity), and systematic structures and forces of political and economic inequality and domina-

2

tion. It describes what Meaghan Morris (1988c) calls the links between the politics of culture and the politics of politics. Cultural studies has always argued that popular culture cannot be defined by appealing to either an objective aesthetic standard (as if it were inherently different from art) nor an objective social standard (as if it were inherently determined by who makes it or for whom it is made). Rather it has to be seen as a sphere in which people struggle over reality and their place in it, a sphere in which people are continuously working with and within already existing relations of power, to make sense of and improve their lives. Cultural studies has questioned the authority of any specific line that can be drawn between popular culture and its other (whether elite or mass culture). But this does not go far enough, for it potentially leaves in place two problematic assumptions. Recognizing that the line between popular and legitimate culture is a political struggle, too much work in cultural studies satisfies itself with merely struggling over the line rather than rejecting the very practice by which the line is constituted. While I agree with Hall that "The changing balance and relations of social forces throughout ... history reveal themselves, time and time again, in struggles over the forms of the culture, traditions and ways of life of the popular classes" (1981, 227), I am not willing to accept the assumption of a constituted category of popular culture that somehow necessarily corresponds to or even is made to correspond to the ways of life ofthe popular classes. If there is "a continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle, by the dominant culture, constantly to disorganize and reorganize popular culture" (233), then it is the very process that must be contested. And that means abandoning the category of popular culture as part of a sociological or normative economy. This it seems to me is at least one reading of Hall's warning that to unravel a history of popular culture, "one could not begin without talking about many things which usually don't figure in the discussion of 'culture' at all. They have to do with the reconstruction of capitalism and the rise of collectivisms and the formation of a new kind of educative state as much as with recreation, danc\) and popular song. As an area of serious historical work, the study of popular culture is like the study of labour history and its institutions" (230). But too much of cultural studies has continued to locate popular culture within two binary normative economies: on the one hand, the popular (as poaching, fragmented, contradictory, bodily, carnivalesque, pleasurable) versus the legitimate (as reified, hierarchical, intellectual, etc.), and on the other hand, the popular (as stylized, artificial,

Introduction

3

disruptive, marginal, resisting) versus the mainstream (as naturalized, commonsensical, incorporated, etc.). Even Hall's often repeated warning to approach popular culture as "the double movement of containment and resistance" (228) has not stopped critics from distributing texts, audiences, and reading practices into these dichotomous judgments. Critics divide up popular culture, identifying specific forms as resistance and relegating all others to a cultural mainstream in which they are "contained" by the existing structures of power. At best, the "dialectic" is given a temporal sense (what was resistant is then contained, perhaps later to escape and become resistant again), or a spatial sense (while the practice resists over here, it is contained over there), or it is traced onto different aspects of the form (this element is resistant, that is contained). The real dialectic-the articulation-of the relationship between the two movements (which might say that, because of its specific resistance, it is also contained, or vice versa) is rarely examined. And at the same time, the tensions between dominant and legitimate culture are often ignored as well. Moving beyond this normative and still static model, my own work has presupposed a more dynamic model of the circulation of popular practices. Instead of constructing some homogeneous mainstream, I see it as a social pastiche, a structured distribution of practices, codes, and effects, constantly rearticulating itself by incorporating pieces of the margins and excorporating pieces of itself into the margins. The distinction between mainstream and margin is then a question, quite literally, of social space, a distinction that does not carry with it any guarantees about either textuality or effects. The mainstream is not a unity but is marked by differences: it is a collection of overlapping cultural styles, defined by sets of productive and consumptive practices. It is differentiated both through the various local alliances that articulate it to concrete places and audiences and through diverse fractions that compete for public attention, whether in fact they define the economic mainstream. Thus, for example in my own work on music, I have always focused on one "face" of the mainstream: when talking about the '60s, I have been concerned primarily with the counterculture, and when talking about the '70s, with disco and punk, although these were never the center of success, as it were. Rather they were the leading edge of the mainstream, dominant fractions that were most visible, most influential, that most indelibly marked their social and cultural contexts at that moment. And the margins are not inherently marginal; they only come to be expelled

4

in this way in the context of the ongoing fluid articulations of the mainstream. Thus my work has always involved a defense of the mainstream of popular culture, or at least an unwillingness to begin by subdividing popular culture into intrinsically politically resonant categories. I want to defend popular culture not only against those who are hostile to any of its forms (by measuring it against "legitimated" culture), but more importantly, against those who are hostile to the largest part of popular culture because they champion those marginal trends or appropriations, as in subcultural theories. I am not a great fan of marginality for its own sake or for the sake ofthe critic's own cherished assumptions. In fact, I rather think that marginality functions as something of a residual force in the 1990s. I do not see popular culture in opposition to legitimate culture (it is even possible that "high" culture is someone's popular culture). Nor do I see a "co-opted" mainstream against a resistant margin. Instead I see a complex range of possibilities for the differentially articulated effects of cultural practices. In other words, being "in the mainstream" is never defined in purely textual terms, nor is it solely a matter of audiences; rather it is a description of a relationship between cultural practices and their contexts, that is, a question ofthe balance offorces in the field. But if cultural studies should demand that we refuse to begin with such normative judgments, that we refuse to organize the diversity into predefined opposed unities, the fact is that such judgments are an integral part of the behavior of those who produce and consume popular culture. And since we too are implicated as participants/consumers of popular culture (in fact, often as fans of what we write about), we face a particular challenge when trying to write as reflective critics: the challenge to postpone judgment until the last instance. Writing as a cultural critic, at least on this model of cultural studies, is not about justifying one's own tastes or the ways they are inserted into one's life. That doesn't mean we don't use those tastes or write about them. Rather we have to distance ourselves from our tastes (or anyone's, for that matter) in order to write about taste itself, to write about what it means to be a fan of different popular cultural practices and organizations, in different contexts. In the end, the question is not whether or how one defends popular culture, but what such practices are doing and what is being done with them. As John Frow puts it, "our attention must be turned away from that mythical popular subject immediate to observation, and focused instead on the relation between two different kinds of practice: a 'first-order' practice of every-

Introduction

5

day culture, and the 'second-order' practice of analysis of it conducted by a reader [sic) endowed with significant cultural capital" (1995, 87). It is not a question of judging people so much as it is of trying to describe how their everyday lives are articulated by and with popular culture, how they are empowered and disempowered by the particular structures and forces that organize, always in contradictory ways, their lives, and how their everyday lives are themselves articulated to and by the trajectories of economic and political power. Otherwise we risk conflating our own academic project with that of the various cultural formations (e.g., youth culture) we are studying. The second assumption that I find problematic in much of the cultural studies work on popular culture is that popular discourses can be neatly divided and distributed into domains-the social, the cultural, the political, and so forth -with their own specific modes of practices and planes of effects. Popular culture, then, is simply a subset of the larger category of cultural practices. Obviously this not only throws popular discourses into the problem of normative differentiation, of discrimination and value, it also locates any attempt to make sense of popular discourses within the logic of the modern concept of culture. According to this logic, culture is the necessary excess filling in for the lack of an adequate instinctual apparatus in human beings. Culture is that which mediates between people and reality, turning chaos into order. Therefore all cultural practices necessarily involve the production of meanings and representations, of subjectivities and identities (making it into little more than the form of ideology or the content of common sense). This notion of culture as a plane of cognitive meanings turns critical analysis into a question of individuated (often defined through social identities) and psychological interpretations and tastes. Additionally culture is all too easily assumed to be equivalent to communication, and all cultural practices are treated as instances of the communicational relationship between text and audience. I have challenged, on both theoretical and strategic grounds, the dominance of such communicational models of culture. I have argued against any analysis that finds meaning in texts or in an audience's experiences of texts. Perhaps my theoretical antagonism to this model derives in part from my position within the discipline of communication itself. But it seems to me that the so-called linguistic or interpretive turn in contemporary theory is actually built upon an assumed centrality of communication in human life and a very limited set of taken-for-granted but rarely elaborated assumptions

6

about the nature of human communication. Within this "turn," power and struggles against domination increasingly are displaced into and imagined within a reified realm of culture and communication. 4 Alternatively I have attempted to hold onto a contextual notion of discursive practices and effects, arguing that both texts and audiences are themselves located within and articulated by broader contexts that determine the identity and effects of any cultural practice. And while I have never wanted to deny that cultural practices enable us to "make sense" of the world and our experiences, I do want to contest the reduction of sense-making to cognitive meaning and interpretation, and the model of culture as somehow standing apart from another plane that it interprets. I have argued that cultural practices always operate on multiple planes, producing multiple effects that cannot be entirely analyzed in the terms of any theory of ideology, consciousness, or semiotic. Thus the problem may be more general, involving not merely the equation of culture and communication, but the very logic of culture itself. Perhaps the problem is the very subsumption of popular discourses into the category of culture. 5 Consequently I have never been particularly interested in either cultural texts or audiences, nor have I conceived of the object of analysis as simply the relationship between them. I suppose one could say that I have been investigating the question oftaste, but I refuse to see it in individual or psychological terms, or to explain it as an excess of determination. Rather I began with the question of popularity: What does it mean that something is popular? But I quickly translated the question from an attribution made to a text to a question of the nature of the relationship offandom. A "fan" is a particular sort of relationship that can be distinguished from a number of other possibilities. First, fandom is a positive relationship, as compared, for example, with an opponent or antagonist. Second, fandom is immediate and, to a certain extent, unreflective, as compared, for example, with a critic. Third, fandom is different from consumption or simple enjoyment (although it may incorporate it), because it involves a certain kind of identification or investment; one can like something (enjoy it, find pleasure in it) without being a fan per se. Finally, fandom is different from what I have called fanaticism, by which I mean an (ideological) identification that involves the production of identity. In fanaticism, the investment in particular cultural practices becomes the dominant structure of one's self-imagination (such as in subcultural identities). It seems reasonable to assume that taste describes the quality and quan-

Introduction

7

tity of one's relationship to particular practices, that it is a matter of the investment people make in particular things, of the ways they matter. Fandom then describes a particular slice of the range of possibilities for such investments, located largely (but probably not entirely) in what is generally called "the mainstream." But fandom is not reducible to a relationship between a text and an audience member, for it involves a more complex set of relations and investments between practices. But if culture is not simply a matter of meaning and communication, then the struggle over "culture" is a struggle over the behavior of the population, especially the different and differently subordinated fractions (which in the contemporary world includes the vast majority of the population), and the role of discursive practices in constructing the machinery by which such behavior is controlled. Is it about constructing the line between legitimate and popular culture? Perhaps that is one ofthe (increasingly minor?) mechanisms of power. Is it about distributing the population into the dominant and the subordinate, about constituting the subject of "popular culture" as the popular classes (as opposed to the power bloc)? Again, that may be one of the ways in which particular discursive practices of the popular may be deployed, but it is not the primary site of the subordination of people or practices, nor of the construction of their identity as subordinated. We fail if we forget what has always been for me the primary lesson of Stuart Hall's classic article: not that popular culture is inherently subordinated or resisting, but rather that it is a force in political struggles: "Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture-already fully formedmight be simply expressed. But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why popular culture matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it" (1981, 239). I am not as concerned with Hall's apparent faith in the revolutionary potential of popular culture as I am with the political drive in his work. The point is that popular discourse is not about culture but about the struggles to articulate the relations between social and economic power, political forms of agency, and modes of discursive practices. Ironically, the New Right seems very much aware of this and, as I have repeatedly argued (e.g., Grossberg 1992), it uses popular culture and popular strategies all the time, in a variety of ways, in the service of its larger

8

political struggle. To put it another way, as Shiach (1989) suggests, the rhetorical power of the discourse of popular culture is much greater than its descriptive specificity or, I would add, its political utility. Instead we might do better by foregrounding the notion of "the popular" in order to explore the relationships between popular practices, everyday lives,6 and machineries of power. If we want to begin to understand popular culture, we may need to stop talking about it. I have tried to understand the increasing power of a popular conservatism in the United States. In many ways, the challenge of this new conservatism merely recreates the question that has troubled political analysts for so long: Why do people agree to their own subordination? or, perhaps less judgmentally, What is it people are doing when they appear to be acceding to specific structures of inequality and power? How is popular culture deployed not only in contemporary political struggles but also in the very construction of the crisis that now drives those struggles forward? How is popular culture implicated in the changing and emerging forms of leadership and authority? How can we describe the complex ways in which a new structure of power is being organized, built upon contradictory political, ideological, economic, and cultural commitments? How is political power being restructured in such a way that ideological and economic subordination are articulated to certain forms of cultural empowerment? How is culture made into the site of the struggle as well as its weapon? Where do contemporary forms of cultural practice engage with the struggle for hegemonic leadership? In attempting to answer some of these questions, or at least to provide the terms within which such an answer might be given, I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to understand the project of the new conservatism, as well as the form and strategy of its success, apart from its relationship to the popular. It operates largely in the realms of the popular and everyday life (although the sites of power from and into which it is reaching are both political and economic). Moreover its successes depend to a large extent upon its ability to appropriate some of the very "operational logics" that made postwar popular culture different and that gave it its central and often threatening place in everyday life, and to make them, simultaneously, into positive and negative allegories for a new kind of political struggle. In other words, I am interested in the changing relations between the popular and a specific hegemonic struggle in the contemporary national (and global) context, and in the ways these planes are being rearticulated to re-

Introduction 9 shape the balance of forces in the social fonnation of the United States. I have a particular reading of hegemony in mind, which starts from Stuart Hall's notion (1988) of the struggle of a power bloc to win the position ofleadership over and against the "people." Hegemony is a matter of consent and not consensus, and it is a specific, historically recent (since it depends on the emergence of "the masses" as a political and cultural subject) form of the struggle for power. But I want to go a step further and argue that there are significantly different hegemonic struggles, depending upon the way in which leadership is constituted and won. While Hall's analysis of Thatcherism depends on a struggle over common sense, I believe that, in the United States, the struggle is around a certain "national popular," which is not the same as, nor reducible to, common sense. The development and increasing urgency of these concerns have always driven my efforts to understand some of the tendencies of postwar American popular culture. If nothing else, this defines for me the difference between doing cultural studies of and with rock, and studying rock as another genre or medium. I have always been opposed to carving up the field of popular culture into a series of new disciplines: film studies, television studies, popular music studies. To my mind none of these makes sense (in tenns of the ways popular practices are inserted into everyday life), and all of them lose sight of the political practice of cultural studies. (I do not mean to suggest, however, that every moment of work in cultural studies has to be saturated, as it were, with political intentionality. Rather the issue is the way one articulates any analysis of popular culture to political projects and possibilities.) My project is to understand how the popular defines at least one set of the conditions of possibilities for the increasing appeal of a new conservatism. But certainly one cannot stop there: one has to transform the understanding of the context as a set of conditions to a more politically productive understanding of the context as a set of possibilities or effectivities. Just as cultural practices are no longer to be taken as merely representational but rather as productive, so the analysis itself must be seen as not merely reconstructing the context but as actively producing or fabricating it, as empowering the practice within the context of its own analysis. Or perhaps we can think of this in Gramscian terms: Analysis is always an attempt to "prise open already existing contradictions ... thereby renovating and making critical an already existing activity." Transfonning the context in this way requires a detour through theory, and

10

it requires as well a theory that is adequate not only to our object, but to the question and the context as well. That is, theory cannot be taken for granted, put in place, as it were, before the work of describing the context and transforming that description has begun. Of course, it is never that simple or easy; one always begins within a theoretical discourse that has to be measured by its ability to actually enable the project. But at the same time, such an "empirico-political" judgment cannot be entirely separated from an ongoing and simultaneous theoretical investigation, an investigation that takes the form of a critical engagement with other theoretical trajectories and critical practices. Thus, despite my rhetorical excesses, I have not attempted to offer a universal theory of culture, or of anything, for that matter. I have been seeking a theoretical and analytic vocabulary that is capable of transforming itself as it engages with the contingencies of politically defined contexts. I have attempted to bring together two different theoretical perspectives, two different practices of cultural studies: a modernist theory of articulation and hegemony (Gramsci, as read through Stuart Hall) and a radically nonmodernist theory of effectivity, spatiality, and "machinics" (Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, often as read through Meaghan Morris).7 The result has been a set of emphases and commitments that I have described elsewhere as a "spatial materialism" which sees power operating in the production of a material context that is itself the space of the production of effects. I also believe that political strategy, as well as assumptions about the nature and sites of struggle, have to be deferred until the empirical and theoretical work is actually under way, if not completed. To begin already knowing what and where the real and possible struggles are is to give up what I take to be the responsibility of the political intellectual. This has led me to seek a political position that acknowledges differences without organizing social space according to a logic of identity. Not surprisingly, I have never been particularly sympathetic to any of the dominant modes of critical practice available for studying popular culture. It seems to me that all ofthese practices miss the very heart of Hall's description of the importance of the popular because they fail to address the actual context of relations, the articulations, between popular culture and systemic politics (or, In my own terms, a context constituted at the intersection of popular discourses, everyday life, and the machineries of power). Rather than treating "the ordinary" as a text, then, I have always attempted to treat the text

Introduction

11

as ordinary, and in so doing to find knowledge on the complex and multidimensional (dare I say fractal) surfaces of social life. But accepting the consequences of articulation, of a radically contextualist model, threatens to make all analysis futile: Imagine you are confronted with a box containing the pieces of an undisclosed number of jigsaw puzzles. All of the original boxes are lost so you don't know what the puzzles are supposed to look like. It is also possible that the same piece will fit in several different puzzles. Thus the identity of each piece is only the set ofits possible places in the as yet undefinable contexts. It is its possible functions. Thus you cannot name a piece or describe its contribution before the puzzle itself is assembled, but of course you cannot know ahead oftime what is being assembled. No piece can be taken for granted, and in the end the significance of any piece-its possibilities for serving a range of functions-might never be exhausted. Yet while there is no necessary correspondence between the surface of a piece and its place, the surface is never blank or innocent and its functions are determined in part by its shape and appearance. It is scarred by traces of its history, a history of functions and effects that mark its emergence and survival and articulation. Read as a signifying practice, any piece can be related to any other piece and interpretation is undecidable or reduced to the "impossible science of the individual." Read alternatively as a function that allows and is allowed by particular connections, analysis is a process of mapping the vectors of effects that traverse and encircle any piece as a possible practice. The metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, however, too easily suggests a static representation (as recuperation) of a real situation and needs to be replaced with a more active and multidimensional one: a functioning or machinic apparatus (imagine a Lego creation that could actually move, and in so doing transformed itself). My own cultural practice attempts to map out the lines that distribute, place, and connect cultural practices. This for me is the import of "everyday life" as a description of the distribution of practices across social space in such a way as to define the differential access that social groups have to specific forms of enactment. Rather than asking how texts communicate, or how discourses construct subjective identities and experiences, or how people use culture, I want to explore the ways in which everyday life is articulated by and with the specific forms and formations, the material deployment and effects, of popular discursive practices. At the same time, I want to identify the different ways in which volition and "will" (i.e., forms of agency) can be enacted contextually

12

to construct people's lives and history. This analytic model allows me to try to describe the various ways in which both discursive practices and human actors are effective. Moreover it now follows that the relations between individuals, culture, and reality cannot simply be defined as the necessary mediation of ideological effects. The site of this intersection must also be opened up, and I have used Bourdieu's notion of sensibilities (1984) to describe the specific planes on which forms of cultural effects and agency are produced. Sensibilities empower cultural practices to work in certain ways, and they empower individuals to enact them in certain places. Sensibilities define the dialectical production of active audiences, everyday practices, and productive contexts. This has important consequences for the study ofthe popular as a sphere in which people struggle over reality and their place in it. I see popular sensibilities delimiting the effects of discursive practices. I have argued that "popular culture" is characterized by the production of affective logics and relations, that is, relations of volitional power, mood, investment, and energization. In fact, the need to radically distinguish affect from the more common notions of desire and pleasure became a dominant theme in my work over the course of the decade that these essays map. Obviously this understanding has been shaped in part by my concern with popularity and fandom on the one hand, and by the fact that the object of my analysis, the rock formation, places musical practices at its center. Talking about the rock formation requires a way of understanding the ability of such sounds both to become the points at which a wide range of practices and commitments can be articulated and to travel across and into different contexts and configurations. Thus I disagree with the new (Derridean-derived) common wisdom that the Western (logocentric) tradition has always privileged the presence of the aural (speech) over visual (writing). In fact, Derrida's vision of aurality makes it into little more than writing (meaning) with an excess of immediacy. But that immediacy is never explored-it is simply assumed as presence (more like breath than sound). I want to make the more limited claim that within North Atlantic modernity, the visual (and the legible) has usually been privileged as the model of perception, knowledge, and sense-making, and hence of our relationship to the world. It seems to me that most work in popular culture, by starting with the visible and the legible, ends up foregrounding the distinction between popular and "high" culture. At the same

Introduction

13

time, North Atlantic modernity has recognized that there is something to human existence beyond the epistemological, but it has quickly assigned this excess to the domain ofthe irrational, the unstructured, the unmappable (e.g., as desire or creativity). Interestingly, much of contemporary cultural theory and criticism seems to assume a binary opposition between affect/the body! materiality and the concrete on the one side, and ideology, subjectivity, consciousness, and theory on the other. Drawing upon Freud, I began to think about affect as the plane of cathexis (including more than just libidinal modes); drawing upon Nietzsche, I began to think about affect as the plane of effectivity (the ability to effect and be effected). My dilemma has always been the relationship between these two understandings of affect. So, using Deleuze and Guattari (1977, 1987), I began to think of affect as a structured plane of effects (investment) that is the very possibility of agency (of acting willfully). That is, affect for me is the plane on which any individual (persons and practices are the two most obvious forms of individuation) is empowered to act in particular ways at particular places. "Affect" is the term I use to describe the observable differences in how practices matter to, or are taken up by, different configurations of popular discourses and practicesdifferent alliances (which are not simply audiences). But perhaps this makes affect sound too mental, for affect is both psychic and material; it demands that we speak of the body and of discursive practices in their materiality. This foregrounding of affect is also probably connected with my reading of Pierre Bourdieu's often overlooked insight that "The resistance of the popular occurs on terrains altogether different from that of culture in the strict sense of the word ... and it takes the most unexpected forms, to the point of remaining more or less invisible to the cultivated eye" (1990, 155). I am interested in the various ways popular discourses can empower and disempower specific groups and practices, in the ways different cultural alliances operate in and produce different "mattering maps." In that sense, I think popular culture cannot be limited to those practices that we might normally locate within the circumscribed (modernist) region of culture. For many generations and for many people, religion itself was within the popular. It served not as an exact body of knowledge but as an affective structure, one that helped make sense of the world by producing the feeling that the world was a totality, that life must have a meaning. The nature of that meaning may have been less important than the confidence that the world,

14

despite its contradictions. still made sense. The popular. in the narrower sense of popular culture. can still serve this function. but it rarely can do so by producing a stable and enduring affective horizon. The question of empowerment is a crucial one. On the one hand. for me empowerment has never been intrinsically political. (Actually. as a careful reading of this essay demonstrates. this is probably not true. It may be fairer to say that I have always felt uncomfortable with models that locate power in an economy of domination and resistance and that see cultural practices as immediately resistant. The necessity of inserting a space between empowerment and resistance became clearer as my work developed.) But I have always conceptualized empowerment as involvement and investment. as a matter of vectors of energy connecting positions in space. And as such it is a necessary condition for the possibility of agency. of any form of action or commitment. and hence of any form of resistance or opposition. However. to leave it at that-at what some writers have called the level of micropolitics (but this is not the Foucauldian sense) or what others describe as everyday life (again. not my sense)-is to render it impotent and irrelevant. For the question is always how structures of empowerment are themselves articulated to and by other forms of practices and effects. It cannot be thought of simply as the articulations between micro and macro levels of politics. but rather of the articulations between different practices and effects which. taken together. make inseparable the politics of everyday life and the politics of "politics .. (both of which exist at both the micro and macro levels). The popular articulates everyday life as a structured mobility by constructing the spaces and places of everyday life. the spaces within which and the places in which people live their everyday lives. In other words. popular culture is constantly enacting and enabling specific forms and trajectories of movement (change) and stability (agency). It defines certain formations of practices as the possible sites of individual investments. sites at which subjects and identities are constructed. It defines the vectors by which people and practices can or cannot move between. and connect. such investments. And it defines particular practices as billboards or guideposts along these vectors. In this way. popular discourses empower and enable specific forms of agency and action in everyday life. and they become crucial sites of both the appeal to authenticity and the construction of authority. Admittedly then. my conclusion-that the new conservatism is an affective struggle to change the maps of what matters through the operating logics of specific popular

Introduction

15

formations,S that it is producing a particular structured mobility (what I have called a disciplined mobilization [Grossberg 1992]) that is articulated in significant ways to and by the struggles of contemporary capitalism-is as much a result of the choices I have made as it is a "description" of an empirical reality. Yet the question is not, Is this an accurate representation? but rather, Does this open up new political strategic possibilities? Yet I would also now stand back from this conclusion a bit, for I believe that my own interdisciplinary efforts in economics (Grossberg 1992) were premature and guided as much by my own theoretical assumptions as by my work in economics. I jumped into the "regulation school" and postfordism as the obvious way to bring economics back into cultural studies, rather than starting at ground level, as it were. Were I to do it over again, I would focus less on abstract notions of economic change and more on the actual sites of economic agency, for example, changes in the tax codes. It is in the context of this larger project that I would position my own researches on rock music: the attempt to analyze the new conservatism's articulation with the popular requires not only that we find a way of understanding the functioning of popular discourses in terms of their operating logics, but also that we describe the specific operating logics that are being deployed in this hegemonic struggle. It is these questions that have defined my interest in rock (although my faith that rock is at the center of the relevant formations is probably more the result of my own position as a fan, and my particular generational identity as a baby boomer, heavily invested, in different ways at different times and places, in rock). Consequently, I have never been particularly interested in talking about what is good or bad music, or about my own taste. I have preferred to assume (and enjoy) the fact that there is always lots of good music. Instead my interests were always in music's relationships to-as part of-a larger context. In asking what music does for its fans and vice versa, I was asking about music's effects in that broader context. Because its effects, however, are shaped in part by how one understands what it can or is supposed to do, my work often starts by describing something like the assumed ideology ofrock; but it is more material, for it is lived in the body and the soul. As a fan and a scholar, I have always been intrigued by the imagination of music's transformative possibilities. Thus my research questions about rock have always been about its political possibilities rather than about any judgment of its aesthetic quality or cultural authenticity; about its effects on everyday life (and its potential deploy-

16

ments into larger hegemonic struggles) rather than about any judgment of its immediate impact as containment within or resistance to some abstract structure of ideological power. I was always interested in the ability of rock to interpellate so many people in particular ways, ways that can only be described by saying that rock mattered: people gave it a real power in and over their lives-without becoming the dominant characteristic in their identity. Being a rock fan has always had significant consequences, but it would be a mistake to assume that interpreting the music or its fans' experience offers an adequate description or account of what drives its fans. Rock seemed to operate somehow as an affective articulatory agent; my questions were how this was accomplished, why, and with what effects. Answering these questions, using a wide variety of research methods (although, I must admit, almost always too informally and without the proper care, but then cultural studies has always had an uncomfortable relationship with questions of methodological rigor), I have studied rock culture as a configuration of cultural practices and effects that have been organized around rock music, the ways its fans have empowered it and been empowered by it. But I have never thought of myself as studying rock music/ culture as an isolatable cultural phenomenon-as a set oftexts and audiences and communicative relations. My notion of rock as an object of study has always operated at a particularly high level of abstraction, a level that I have called "the rock formation." This phrase is meant to signal a specific material, spatial, and temporal identity. Thus I assumed that rock's identity (whether as a musical genre or a specific text/practice within the genre) and effects depend on more than its specific textuality or sound. To describe rock culture as a formation is to constitute it as a material-discursive and nondiscursive-context, a complex and always specific organization of cultural and noncultural practices that produces particular effects: specific forms and organizations of boredom and fun, of pleasure and pain, of meaning and nonsense. The rock formation cuts across any attempt to divide up the field of popular discourses and practices, bringing together genres, media, styles, and so forth. To speak of a formation is also to constitute rock culture spatially, as a particular dispersion of practices across time and space. I was never interested in the empirically describable details of various specific organizations of fans and practices (what I have called apparatuses, scenes, and alliances) per se, but in the more abstract questions of how such assemblages and their effects might be understood. I have never been interested in the concrete as a local, empiri-

Introduction

17

cal phenomenon (that I leave to better critics and analysts than myself) but in the formation of rock culture at the broadest level-that is, as a particular organization of American popular culture; my disinterest in any concrete instance (geographically and temporally) of rock culture has been defined (and to my mind justified) by my interest in the concrete context of American political hegemony. I have never championed the local; rather I have always argued that political projects define the appropriate definition of contexts and objects of analysis. For, given my project, the particular articulations and manifestations of the rock formation were less important than its existence across practices, time, and space. At the same time, the rock formation has a temporal extension and boundary: it is a historical event and production that emerged at a particular moment, made possible by and in response to specific conditions of possibility, conditions that enabled rock culture but also constrained it, that defined it but also opened up its trajectories of transformation, that empowered it but also set limits on its shapes and effects. But ifthe rock formation is an event, it must also have the possibility of an end, which explains my obsession with the notion that rock is dead, again not as a judgment I want to make about particular musical practices or variants of rock culture but as a discursive haunting within the rock formation and, of course, as a possible eventual reality. That is, I simply assumed that if the rock formation emerged as a response to particular conditions, eventually, when those conditions changed and the effects of the discourses within the formation changed (not necessarily in some simple corresponding way), then whatever music sounded like (perhaps even exactly like some of the music in the rock formation), the set of relations and effects articulated around it would not be the same. In fact they would be so different as to no longer be usefully described as another variant ofthe rock formation. The discontinuities would be more significant than the continuities. Understanding this formation involves trying to map the conditions and effects of its emergence, understanding why this particular popular formation appeared rather than another. What sort of forces and dimensions constituted the context of the emergence of the rock formation? How have these conditions-and the relations among them-been transformed over the course of recent American history? Obviously it is impossible to know in advance what conditions are the most pertinent, which have the greatest purchase and the greatest reach. But I believe one can put together a sense of the context of the

18

rock formation by describing at least the following aspects: the economic and political terrain; the structural position of youth and generations; the state of play of the various axes that articulate power and identity; the dominant structures of feeling; the media economy (the availability and popularity of various media with different audiences); the state and structure of the music technology and industry; the availability (to youth audiences) of images and discourses of alienation and rebellion; and finally, the emergent structures of feeling (including that of youth in its various articulations). But the real work begins when one tries to describe the effects of this context and the ways in which particular cultural practices and formations emerge and function as responses to and transformations of that context. Even to put it this way is to risk the danger of falling back into a model of culture representing an external social and political reality. Instead what I am attempting to do is to redescribe the context, to fabricate an other map that enables us to better see the contradictions, fault lines, and struggles that are already at work in the context, either as actualities or as possibilities. If people make the world but in conditions not of their own making, then we must move from a description of the social context as a structure of social relationships and experiences to another description of the context as a field of forces. My own critical investment in the popular leads me to understand such a field in terms of-and as constituted by-a struggle over the production and distribution of operating logics: modes of articulation by which particular organizations of practices are able to produce particular organizations of effects. That is to say, if we assume that contexts (everyday life) are not static structures but active configurations of possibilities, of mobilities and stabilities, of the spaces and places at which forms of agency become available, then popular formations define possible ways of producing and navigating one's way within and across the spatial field of everyday life, even as they constitute that field. This theoretical apparatus developed as I attempted to describe the logicswhat I have called the politics-of thH rock formation and how they have changed over the past forty years (and eventually how they have played into the new conservative hegemony). This involves laying out the affective geography of the rock formation as it has moved across the various configurations of everyday life (i.e., the first description of the context). This "geometry" describes a functioning apparatus that is transformed by its conditions even as it transforms itself. It is a matter of material effects and agencies

Introduction

19

that need not be consciously experienced or represented. It describes the possibilities-the forms and locations of empowerment and disempowerment-that the rock formation makes available to those placed within its logics. Given the lack of any available vocabulary for describing the forms, quantities, and organizations of affect, this geography or operational logic cannot be described directly, but the parameters and possibilities of its articulatory power can be laid out at least schematically. The only significant continuity I "discovered" in the process of mapping out the conditions of the emergence of the rock formation is a certain "postmodern vector" operating at the intersection of the rock formation and everyday life in postwar America. For me, the postmodern is a very specific and restricted (always local, partial, and temporary, although also mobile and increasingly powerful) rearticulation of everyday life (or experience, as long as experience is not reduced to the ideologically constructed realm of meaning, knowledge, and subjectivity). It involves the proliferation of sites in everyday life where the relations among ideology, desire, and affect are attenuated. Whether I describe it as indifference or authentic inauthenticity, then, the postmodern is not an experience of subjects or a representation of an external reality, but a form of practice that produces particular sorts of affective alliances. And this vector is rearticulated into the popular logics of the rock formation-although its importance, pertinence, and power have varied significantly over time-where it defines the affectivity of the formation itself. The result is a new articulatory logic and a rapid movement, into the center of contemporary cultural life, of the various figures of this affective logic. I want to make clear that I do not think that this logic, or the vector that it rearticulated, constitutes a crisis in and of themselves. It is only when they are themselves deployed within and linked to specific hegemonic struggles that the postmodern becomes a crisis of sorts. In this effort I have too often ignored important differences and contradictions within the broader rock formation, and I have given too little attention to the changing shape of the rock formation across space and over time. However, the inability to deal with change in rock in anything other than the most simple terms is not only my problem. I would like to think that my work has begun to develop some tools that might enable one to describe the different spatial and temporal articulations of the rock formation, according to the following dimensions:

20

-the rock terrain describes the internal differentiation of the alliances within the formation itself (e.g., mainstream, countercultural, undergrounds, alternatives) -the affective machine describes the primary register of rock's productivity (e.g., fun, lifestyle, style/fantasy, attitude) -the ideologies of the formation describes its more or less explicit politics (e.g., liberalism, anarchic utopianism, self-conscious commodification) -the articulation of rock as a differentiating machine describes its investment in its own sense of difference (whether differences in taste do matter; whether they are articulated to generational, social, and political differences and to identities) -the politics of fun describes both the antagonism around which the formation is structured (fun versus boredom, insanity, reality, or despair) and the primary sites of investment (youth, movement, pleasure, experimentation, body, pain, style, reflexivity, entertainment, etc.) -the politics of everyday life describes different projects in relation to the conditions of possibility of everyday life (relative deterritorialization, the fantasy of absolute deterritorialization, reterritorialization, polemological struggle) -the geometry of affect describes where rock locates itself in the formation of everyday life (e.g., as topical it has a place of its own; as pantopical it is everywhere; as heterotopical it is only in other's places; and as atopical it is a space without a place, which is to say, at the border) -affective differences describes the nature of its borders within the dominant culture (independent, alternative, oppositional) -affective alliances describes the nature of its self-positioning (experiential, utopian, critical) Together these dimensions might enable us to describe rock's politics of empowerment, its operational logic as different ways of allowing people to navigate through and even to respond to their lived context. I have always thought of rock as a practice that helps us make it through the day. These dimensions, taken together, can be used, I think, to chart the trajectory of the rock formation and to mark the point of its possible disappearance. If I am right that the rock formation is coming to an end or at least being replaced by something different enough that it must be recognized as such, if! am right that the rock formation is no longer as powerful a site of agency and articulation as it has been for the past forty years, then both the terms for

Introduction

21

analysis and the political stake in such studies will have to be rethought. I think this partly explains the increasing professionalization and disciplinization of popular music studies, a development with which, I must admit, I have limited sympathy and in which I have no interest. Ironically these developments have done little to advance the potentialities of such writing. In fact, I would suggest that writing on popular music-whether journalistic or academic-is rather unique (compared to writing on other popular cultural forms) in that it has not moved very far in the past forty years. But perhaps it would be more accurate to offer a slightly different description of this disappearance (and in so doing to revise my conclusion in the essay "Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care?"). The formation that I have described throughout the body of my work emerged in the 1950s to become the dominant cultural formation of youth (if not ofthe United States) from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. But by the end of the 1980s, I believe, it is more appropriately described as a residual formation, still active and important around the edges, as it were, it occasionally moves into and is expelled from the center. But this formation, increasingly organized around generic commitments and differences, is no longer dominant and sometimes has the effect of marginalizing other forms of cultural practice and social relationships. What has replaced it? I now think that my essay "Is Anybody Listening?" conflated the new dominant cultural formation with an emergent formation. I would describe the new dominant as a mainstream committed to (and invested in) eclecticism and hybridity. It is a formation that operates without the mediations of the ideology of authenticity; hence it willingly and simultaneously embraces the global megastar and the local rebel. As I described it, it gives up rock's differentiating function even as it tries to hold onto its territorializing power. But it is not, in the last instance, a musical formation insofar as its center is defined as much by visual practices and commitments as by musical ones. On the other hand, I now believe that there is also an emergent formation that can only be described as a network of scenes (including dance, rap, and rock). These scenes are geographically identifiable and define a system of differentiation that is not binary but territorializing. It is this formation I described as having a polemological (explicitly antagonistic) politics, as operating on the borders of everyday life by imagining an identification between the country's poor white trash, black youth, and white middle-class youth. Somewhere between these new formations I would like to begin to imagine new possibilities for a popular politics.

22 If particular cultural formations and historical events come to an end, then some old political possibilities may no longer be available. We may lament such closures, but we would be better advised to ask what new political possibilities have become imaginable. That is, my interest in the death of rock is actually an interest in the possibility of rock's becoming something else, in an attempt to ask what a new popular politics might look like and how it might be discursively constructed. In fact it seems to me that the disappearance of any progressive political movement (not as an institutional organization but as an organization of spaces and places) has been actively constructed, for particular fractions of the populace, at three sites, all being actively constructed through rearticulations of postmodernity and the operating logic of the rock formation: first, the impossibility of investing in the political (i.e., whether in the government or "the people" as agents of change or in some utopian field of political and ethical values); second, the active discouragement of any investment in the possibility of political community (Le., of rethinking the relation ofthe individual to the group and of identity to struggle); and third, the impossibility of articulating a theory and practice of agency (of reconsidering how people make history but not in conditions of their own making). These are, in the first instance, problems of everyday life, constructed in struggles in and over the popular. They are also problems at the intersection of everyday life and the tendential forces struggling to determine it. But they are also challenges for the intellectual. and we will have failed if we cannot find ways to address them outside the limits of our own theoretical and political positions, if we cannot speak, as intellectuals, through the popular, in order to connect everyday life with the very real struggles and sufferings of economic and political injustice. I have tried to suggest throughout this essay something about my projectabout its contextual and strategic approach-but equally important, I have tried to imply that it is as much a collective project as it is my own. After all, cultural studies is itself an intellectual practice that not only claims to belong somewhere but also claims to belong within a collective intellectual enterprise. It challenges not only the boundaries between the disciplines but, more importantly, the boundary between the academy and the world outside. Much like rock, it has always been for me empowering and enabling, and like rock, it is always fun. But also like rock, it offers a challenge I have always taken seriously: In a struggle in which the dominant mattering maps are being restructured-when the individual and the concrete matter so much more

Introduction

23

than the general and the abstract; when the freedom of the market matters so much more than caring for the people-the political intellectual has no choice but to enter into the terrain of the popular. When the very possibility of political struggle is being erased-not because the scene of politics (or the public sphere) has disappeared in some postmodern apocalypse, but because there is an active attempt to use popular discourses to restructure the possibilities of everyday life-the political intellectual has no choice but to enter into the struggle over affect in order to articulate new ways of caring. JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE THROUGH ...

Introductions are almost too tempting; they provide a magical opportunity to rewrite if not one's own history, then at least the history of one's own labor. By substituting the geography of placement for the history of production, an introduction becomes the natural point of departure (home?) from which the reader can embark on his or her journey, retracing the steps of the mysterious author in search of whatever knowledge or insight he or she may have discovered (destination?). But the reader knows it is a fabrication (and the author knows the reader knows ... ). for this starting point has been constructed along the way and the author has never reached his or her destination. So perhaps it is necessary, in the last instance, to acknowledge briefly some of the choices that have been made and the weaknesses that they attempt to hide. Publishing a collection of essays written over the course of a decade poses some immediate problems. First, there is the threat of redundancy. While I have attempted to limit the amount of redundancy (largely through my choice of essays). I have by no means erased all of it. Redundancy after all is a fact of intellectual life, but more importantly, it can be productive. It may involve elaborations or subtle shifts in emphasis and direction; it may inscribe different takes on the same theme, attempts to try new vocabularies and new frames, or to find better articulations of a problematic and a position. These essays are, after all. only provisional takes. attempts to move without ever knowing where I am trying to get to. Second, there is the choice of how to present the essays: thematically or chronologically. I am drawn to the latter because it provides material evidence of the actual labor of intellectual investigation, with all of its fragility, instability. and repetitiveness. I have chosen the former, however, because it more clearly demonstrates the ways in which the different foci of my work

24

intersect and rearticulate each other. I also believe it highlights certain continuities: a commitment to contextuality and materiality; a concern with productivity rather than interpretation; a focus on the hegemonic organization of affect; a desire for a politics that is not based on notions of identity; and a rhetoric of spatiality and geography. Third, one is forced to confront the questions and criticisms that colleagues-both sympathetic and not so sympathetic-have raised over the years. Some of the things they have pointed to I would change if I could, other things I would not change, and still others I know I cannot change. My work is admittedly abstract and speculative. Some have argued that for me theory has become a constant detour deferring the concrete; others have suggested that my arguments lack the mediations that link the abstractions of theory to the materiality of the ways hegemonic struggles are played out in everyday life. There is, no doubt, some truth to both of these. And yet I choose to remain abstract and speculative. Like Deleuze, I believe that philosophy seeks to make concepts that can touch and affect the real. Moreover, I want to find a way to interrupt the comfortable rhythms of narrative coherence. While I want to leap metonymically, back and forth and across the concrete and the abstract, I want to avoid the pitfalls of postmodern synecdoche, which lets the particular stand in for the general. This no doubt contributes to the fact that my writing is, too often, too difficult. I take this criticism seriously if only because I would like to think that some people might find my work useful and that it may offer some new directions for both intellectual and political endeavors. I have no doubt that many of these essays could be rewritten more effectively, but I fear that those who found them inaccessible would still find them inaccessible even if better written. I apologize to those who put in the effort to read these essays and, in the end, do not find the effort worthwhile, but I hope that there are some out there who do find their efforts rewarded. At the same time, I do not believe that accessibility is a criterion of potentially useful knowledge, at least not in the first instance. I do not know of any correlation between accessibility and significance, which is not to claim that inaccessibility is a measure of significance. I would like to think that at least part of the difficulty of my work is the result of my project: to find a radically contextual theoretical vocabulary that can describe the ongoing production of the real as an organization of inequality through an analysis of cultural events. Moreover, such a vocabulary would have to offer a viable notion of agency without falling back on models that privilege either human subjec-

Introduction

25

tivity or processes of epistemological mediation. I am interested in a theory of how reality is made, but I am not willing to assume that human beings are consciously in control of the mechanisms or practices of that making. Finally, I want to comment on the fact, often observed, that I have too often avoided raising issues of gender and race in my researches on the politics of the popular. I do not want to deny that such cultural identities have become crucial sites of political investment in the contemporary world, nor that there are important questions about the relations between the popular and structures of race, gender, and sexual identity. In fact I think there are many critics exploring these questions, while issues about everyday life and hegemonic struggles remain largely ignored. In an ideal world, these two political vectors would be connected in all their complexity, but politics does not often afford us the luxury of ideal interventions. In truth, I do have theoretical reservations about theories of identity and difference and strategic concerns about the efficacy of a politics organized around investments in cultural identities. Nevertheless, the mere absence of a topic from a discussion, however important, does not, in my opinion, necessarily constitute a serious weakness; the real question is whether that absence could be addressed in some terms or whether it is a necessary consequence of the position itself. In the contemporary political climate, where self-reflexivity is too often reduced to a litany of cultural identities-I am middle-aged, middle-class, Jewish, heterosexual, male, married, with one infant son, of Eastern European descent, and so on-pronouns have become as significant as the identities they are assumed to represent. The problem of how one may speak of and for others has become almost insurmountable. The political intellectual is caught in an impossible dilemma: either constructing or negating the other. Consequently, "we" has become one of the more dangerous words to use: Let the speaker beware! But I choose to use it and I will continue to do so, although I am constantly challenged by its exclusionary operation. After all, it is claimed, the very presumption of inclusion that "we" carries with it also entails the exclusion of significant fractions of the population. But I do not accept the assertion that "we" necessarily reinscribes the particular economy of space and identity on which so much of contemporary politics seems to be based. Apart from the fact that I am increasingly opposed to political strategies that privilege identity (and that conflate subjectivity, cultural identity, and political agency), I am also convinced that this view of the deployment

26

of "we" depends entirely upon an unacceptable-referential-theory of language. My use of "we" is neither referential nor singular. It is intended to be slippery and multifunctional. It is, I hope, invocatory, productive, even seductive. It is an invitation to belong within the space opened up by my discourse, although I hope it does not limit the ways one might belong. It is an invitation to care.

I

DANCING

(POPULAR

MUSIC)

i\

nother Boring Day in Paradise:

Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life

About five years ago, I began to teach courses on the cultural history ofrock and roll. My approach was simple: I would try to describe the texts, interpreting the significance produced by the unique synthesis of musical texture and lyrical content. Then I would suggest correspondences to the situation of its audiences which were mediated through the institutional practices of production and consumption. The music obliquely represented and responded to the structure of experience of at least certain portions of its youth audience. As I sought more adequate readings, the correspondences became increasingly refracted; the music had to be located in an overdetermined context: class, race, subcultures, gender, as well as age exerted unequal pressures on and were represented in rock and roll. Nevertheless, my students-as well as the rock and roll fan in me-were noticeably dissatisfied. While they often assented to my readings, it was clear that my readings failed to capture something important, something that was intimately connected to rock and roll's power as well as to its cultural politics. As I tried to respond to their discomfort, I found myself confronting two features of rock and roll: its heterogeneity and its affectivity. Rock and roll is not only characterized by musical and stylistic heterogeneity; its fans differ radically among themselves although they may listen to the same music. Different fans seem to use the music for very different purposes and in very different ways; they have different boundaries defining not only what they listen to but what is included within the category of rock and roll. Thus they objected to my attempt to define one experience or use of rock and roll as the only one. Sometimes, for example, the meaning of particular lyrics was significant; other times and more commonly, the experience was a purely affective one.

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Thus if I wanted to understand the cultural significance of rock and roll (assuming that it has some unity despite its heterogeneity), that is, if! wanted to examine the specific social effects of postwar youth music, I had to recognize that the affective power of rock and roll goes beyond that of leisure itself. Of course, the observation that music has powerful emotional effects is hardly controversial. On the contrary, it is the assumption that musical texts, even with lyrics, function by representing something-meanings, ideas, or cultural experience-that is problematic. When applied to rock and roll, the assumption does not seem false, merely incomplete: particular instances of rock and roll may represent different things for different audiences and in different contexts. Much of the recent writing on rock and roll is similarly incomplete. For example, Frith argues (1981) that rock and roll is a form ofleisure activity that represents various fantasies about the possibilities of a life constituted entirely as leisure. The matrix of these fantasies is the dialectic of working-class-urban-street culture and middle-class-suburban-creative culture. Hebdige, coming out of the tradition of British subcultural studies, locates (1979) rock and roll within the larger category of subcultural styles which represents and provides an imaginary solution to the experienced contradictions of British working-class life. Both Frith and Hebdige treat rock and roll as a "representation" located within a context of class relationships. And while they each capture important aspects of the place and effects of rock and roll in contemporary culture, neither one is able to account for the reality and the generality ofthe affective power of the music: "The most disturbing thing ... is how little the establishment as such acknowledges what is a kind of continuous guerilla warfare ... Rock ... is the only medium that makes any sense of life-aesthetically or politically-at all" (Frith, cited in Marcus 1981b,124). Each of these writers proposes, adjacent to his interpretation of rock and roll, an alternative strategy. Frith proposes that we study the ways in which the audiences use the music, while Hebdige suggests that the effects of rock and roll depend upon its existence as a range of signifying practices. Still, though, neither approach is able to respond to two significant questions that I wish to raise: How does one describe the specific effects (and popularity) of particular forms of rock and roll? How does one describe the consistency that constitutes rock and roll as a determinate cultural form? Nevertheless, my own approach takes something from each of these writers. Like Frith, I propose to examine rock and roll functionally. But rather than assuming its

Another Boring Day in Paradise 31 audience in advance and asking how individuals, either consciously or unconsciously, use the music, I will focus on the ways rock and roll produces the material context within which its fans find themselves, a context defined by affective investments rather than by semantic representations. Thus the rock and roll fan is a part of the effects of the functioning of rock and roll itself. My concern is with the possibilities opened up between, by, and for the music and its audiences within the everyday life of postwar America. Like Hebdige, I propose to treat rock and roll as a set of practices, but practices of strategic empowerment rather than of signification. Rock and roll structures the space within which desire is invested and pleasures produced. It is thus immediately implicated in relations of power and a politics of pleasure. I am concerned with the ways in which rock and roll provides strategies of survival and pleasure for its fans, with the ways in which rock and roll is empowered by and empowers particular audiences in particular contexts. Rock and roll becomes visible only when it is placed within the context of the production of a network of empowerment. Such a network may be described as an "affective alliance": an organization of concrete material practices and events, cultural forms, and social experience that both opens up and structures the space of our affective investments in the world. My aim then is to describe the parameters of rock and roll's empowering effects in terms of the production of affective alliances. (For the basis of this position, see Grossberg 1982.) I will propose five general hypotheses to describe rock and roll, framed within the problematic of power as the organization of desire. The first suggests that the dominant affective context of rock and roll is a temporal rather than a sociological one. While class, race, gender, nationality, subculture, and even age may be partly determinate of specific effects, the emergence of rock and roll is enabled within the context of growing up (in the United States, for my purposes) after the Second World War. This context defines the practice of rock and roll's continued self-production. The second hypothesis argues that the power of rock and roll cannot be sufficiently described in ideological terms, either as the constitution of an identity or the production of a critical utopia. Rather rock and roll inscribes and cathects a boundary within social reality marked only by its otherness, its existence outside of the affective possibilities of the ruling culture (the hegemony).1 In more traditional terms, rock and roll inscribes the particular mark of postwar alienation upon the surface of other social structures of difference. The third hypothesis describes

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the strategic functioning of rock and roll: it brings together disparate fragments of the material context of the everyday life of its audiences within different rock and roll apparatuses. It is the rock and roll apparatus that maps out particular lines of affective investment and organization. It therefore both locates and produces the sites at which pleasure is possible and important for its audiences; it provides the strategies through which the audience is empowered by and empowers the musical apparatus. The fourth hypothesis describes the diverse possibilities of rock and roll by using the concepts of "encapsulation" and "affective alliances." The final hypothesis discusses the notion of "co-optation" as a significant strategy by which rock and roll produces its own history and reproduces its affective power. My conclusion will argue that rock and roll is a historically locatable event and that changes in the contemporary context of everyday life raise the question ofthe impending "disappearance" of rock and roll. HYPOTHESIS 1. ROCK AND ROLL IN THE POSTWAR CONTEXT

Any reading of rock and roll must begin by identifying the context within which it is to be located and its relations identified. Despite the increasingly prevalent gesture toward overdetermination, the dominant features are almost always identified as sociological variables, that is, the sociological characteristics of the music's producers and consumers. Such variables, while often locally significant, must constantly confront their own exceptions. The response that this is no longer rock and roll or that it has lost its real cultural significance (and politics) seems merely to evade the issue. Further, such sociological descriptions do not provide convincing accounts of the emergence and continued power ofrock and roll. Is there, then, some feature that remains common to all contexts of rock and roll? If we start with the simple assumption that rock and roll is related in some way to youth's experiences of alienation, powerlessness, and boredom, can we locate the context within which these experiences emerge and function as specific responses of a "youth culture"? The adolescence of the rock and roll audience, especially in the fifties but continuing through today, is obviously an important determinant of the music itself as well as of its cultural politics. The frustrations, desires, fears, and resentments of puberty provide much ofthe energy and many of the concerns ofrock and roll. However, even this apparently simple determination is me-

Another Boring Day in Paradise 33 diated by other emotions, experiences, and events. While the first audience of rock and roll was in fact teenagers, the statement certainly no longer holds. And similarly, while the class experience represented in rock and roll may function significantly in one context, it may not function similarly in different contexts, and in some it may be generally absent. Attempts to generalize Hebdige's reading of punk as working-class music must confront not only Frith's argument that it emerged out of a largely art school and "bohemian" context, but also those situations in which punk functions in a largely middle-class context without any romanticization of the working class. The fact that particular forms of rock and roll, and even perhaps rock and roll in general, have specific class roots does not necessarily say anything about its reception and soeial effects in particular contexts. This of course does not deny that the fact of (class) origin may have specific mediated effects, particularly through local iconographies. Consider by contrast the obvious fact that rock and roll emerged in a particular temporal context, variously characterized as late capitalism, postmodernity, and so forth. The dominant moments of this postwar context have been widely described: the effects of the war and the Holocaust on the generations of parents; economic prosperity and optimism; the threat of instant and total annihilation (the atomic bomb); the cold war and McCarthyism, with the resulting political apathy and repression; the rise of suburbia with its inherent valorization of repetition; the development of late capitalism (consumption society), with its increasingly sophisticated technology for the rationalization and control of everyday life; the proliferation of mass media and advertising techniques and the emergence of an aesthetic of images; the attempt and ultimate inability to deal with the fact of the baby boom; the continuation of an ideology of individuality, progress, and communication (the American Dream); and, to echo Sontag, an increasingly receding threshold of the shocking. The result was a generation of children that was not only bored (the American Dream turned out to be boring) and afraid, but lonely and isolated from each other and the adult world as well. The more the adult world emphasized their children's uniqueness and promised them paradise, the angrier, more frustrated, and more insecure they grew. These cultural effects were themselves located within an even broader apparatus whose significance is only now being recognized: they operated in a world characterized by a steadily rising rate of change. What is unique, however (since this process had been going on for some time), is that change

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increasingly appears to be all that there is; it does not allow any appeal to a stable and predictable teleology. There is in fact no sense of progress that can provide meaning or depth and a sense of inheritance. Both the future and the past appear increasingly irrelevant; history has collapsed into the present. The ramifications of this fact are only now becoming visible as we confront a generation that no longer believes that their lives will be better than that of their parents, even though the "rhetoric of progress" is still present. Suddenly, "we are obliged to remake from scratch the foundation of our taste, as of our politics and our very lives. Old ways of judging linger [only as] unexamined habits, comforting defenses against the recognition of our common lostness" (Schjeldjahl1981, 67). As history loses its sense, it can no longer be a source for the values by which one chooses and validates one's actions. As John Berger writes, Today what surrounds the individual life can change more quickly than the brief sequence of that life itself. The timeless has been abolished and history has become ephemerality. History no longer pays its respect to the dead: the dead are simply what has passed through ... This means that the common experience of moments which defy time is apparently denied by everything which surrounds them. Such moments have ceased to be windows looking across history toward the timeless. The experience which instigates the phrase for ever has now to be assumed alone and privately. And so its role is changed: instead of transcending, it isolates. (Berger 1980, 89) As history becomes mere change-discontinuous, directionless, and meaningless-it is replaced by a sense of fragmentation and rupture, of oppressive materiality, of powerlessness and relativism. This new sociohistorical context further reinforced youth's conviction of its own uniqueness; indeed it determined their dominant generational needs and perceptions in the fifties and since. If adolescence is a time when one seeks not only pleasure but also a viable adult identity, then the collapse of the deep structure of history undermined the traditional models. The significance of Holden Caulfield, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and the Beats as cultural heroes lies in their struggle to achieve some identity consistent with this new set of experiences, and the Beats' turn to the model of the black hipster pointed the way for the rock and roll/youth culture. Rock and roll emerges from and functions within the lives of those genera-

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tions that have grown up in this postwar, postmodern context. It does not simply represent and respond to the experiences ofteenagers, nor to those of a particular class. It is not merely music of the generation gap. It draws a line through that context by marking one particular historical appearance of the generation gap as a permanent one. Similarly, class divisions are reinscribed and realigned as they are traversed by the boundary of postmodernity, of the desires of those generations who have known no other historical moment. Postmodernity is, I shall suggest, not merely an experience nor a representation of experience; it is above all a form of practice by which affective alliances are produced, by which other practices and events are invested with affect. While many commentators have described rock and roll as watered-down rhythm and blues (or more accurately, a synthesis of blues and white hillbilly music), I would argue that the fact of its production and reception by white youth involved a real transformation of its musical roots. It located them within a different, emergent historical formation, whose contours I have described in terms clearly meant to echo the aesthetic of postmodern practice: a denial oftotality and a subsequent emphasis on discontinuity, fragmentation, and rupture; a denial of depth and a subsequent emphasis on the materiality of surfaces; a denial of any teleology and a subsequent emphasis on change and chance so that history becomes both irrelevant and the very substance of our existence; a denial of freedom and innocent self-consciousness and a subsequent emphasis on context, determination, and the intertextuality of discursive codes. The question is whether the postmodernist rejection of meaning in favor of the production of fragments is merely the logical conclusion of the capitalist commodity fetish. In what sense is the postmodernist fragment, even when it accepts the inevitability of its existence as a commodity, something other than a commodity? The commodity in late capitalism exists at the site ofthe contradiction between modernist and postmodernist cultural practices. The commodity as such is still determined by a representation of totality; it signifies a fragmentation only in the context of a totalizing impulse that gives meaning, not only to the particular object (e.g., as status, fashion, or exchange value) but also to the general process of commodification. Postmodern practice denies any such totalizing impulse. We might say that the object in late capitalism functions in the context of an ideological aesthetic on the one hand and a structural aesthetic on the other. The former describes the way the

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object is represented; postmodern fragments are appropriated into the context of the commodity by defining them in purely economic or aesthetic (avant-garde) terms. This is made easier by postmodernism's propensity to use capitalist commodities within its discourse. A structural aesthetic describes postmodern practice as a demystification of the commodity, its aesthetic reduction to a fragment sans context or significance, a signifier without a signified. Postmodernism is the aesthetic practice of deconstruction. The object within late capitalism then exists in the space of the contradiction between these two practices: an ideological mystification that turns it into a commodity and a structural demystification that returns it to the material context. By their very nature, postmodern objects cannot be merely consumed unless they have been recuperated by being re-presented as commodities. Thus the postmodern aesthetic of rock and roll does not determine the music's existence as a commodity but rather as a constant struggle between commodification and fragmentation. I can now try to specify the particular form of postmodern practice that characterizes rock and roll as an appropriation of hegemonic practices into its own discourses. If the response of the hegemony to resistance is through practices of incorporation (see Williams 1981), then the power of rock and roll lies in its practice of "excorporation," operating at and reproducing the boundary between youth culture and the dominant culture. Rock and roll reverses the hegemonic practices of incorporation, by which practices claiming a certain externality are relocated within the context of hegemonic relations. Rock and roll removes signs, objects, sounds, styles, and so forth from their apparently meaningful existence within the dominant culture and relocates them within an affective alliance of differentiation and resistance. The resultant shock-of both recognition and an undermining of meaning-produces a temporarily impassable boundary within the dominant culture, an encapsulation of the affective possibilities of the rock and roll culture. Rock and roll is a particular form ofbricolage, a uniquely capitalist and postmodern practice. It functions in a constant play of incorporation and excorporation (both always occurring simultaneously), a contradictory cultural practice. The most obvious result of this is the particular form of irony in rock and roll (which connects it with the tradition of symbolism-dada-surrealism). As Pic carella has noted, "What has always separated rock and roll from its roots in blues and country music, the essence of its youthfulness, is ironic distance from direct personal expression. In its outlandish styles and ex-

Another Boring Day in Paradise 37 aggerated mannerisms, rock showmanship tends toward the defensive selfalienation of adolescence" (1982, 83). Rock and roll practice is a form of resistance for generations with no faith in revolution. Rock and roll's resistance-its politics-is neither a direct rejection ofthe dominant culture nor a utopian negation (fantasy) of the structures of power. It plays with the very practice that the dominant culture uses to resist its resistance: incorporation and excorporation in a continuous dialectic that reproduces the very boundary of existence. Because its resistance remains, however, within the political and economic space of the dominant culture, its revolution is only a "simulacrum." Its politics emerge only at that moment when political consciousness is no longer possible. Its practice is surrealism without the dream/nightmare, dada without the representation of a political option. Unable to reject, control, or even conceptualize this postmodern reality, it becomes both the source of oppression and the object! context of celebration and fun. Repelled and angered by the boredom (repetitiveness), meaninglessness, and dehumanization of the contemporary world, youth celebrates these very conditions in its leisure (technology, noise, commodity fetish, repetition, fragmentation, and superficiality). Despondency and pleasure become mutually constitutive. Rock and roll seeks its place within and against the very postmodernity that is its condition of possibility. Of course, at moments rock and roll has sought as well to flee that impossible denial of representation. For example, while the subculture of acid rock played with signs and objects as if they were merely the pieces in a bricoleur's game, that culture also denied its postmodern practice by appealing to a myth of natural reality. Although its texts were not transparent, they were located within a larger context in which resistance was harnessed in the interests of a utopian retreat into the "natural" life. HYPOTHESIS 2. THE POWER OF ROCK AND ROLL: AFFECTIVE DIFFERENCE

We might begin to understand how rock and roll works by affirming that it is, above all, fun-the production of pleasure (e.g., in the sheer energy of the music, the danceable beat, the sexual echoes, etc.). In fact, the most devastating rejection of a particular rock and roll text is to say that it is "boring." Thus rock and roll can never take itself too seriously. To be effective it must constantly deny its own significance; it must focus the attention of its audiences on its surfaces. Its power lies not in what it says or means but in what it does

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in the textures and contexts of its uses. For in fact different audiences interpret the same texts differently, and there seems to be little correlation between semantic readings and uses/pleasures. I do not mean to suggest a disjunction of lyrics and sounds (which may operate in a variety of relations to each other) but rather that rock and roll cannot be approached by some textual analysis of its message. Rock and roll, whether live or recorded, is a performance whose "significance" cannot be read off the "text." It is not that rock and roll does not produce and manipulate meaning but rather that meaning itself functions in rock and roll affectively, that is, to produce and organize desires and pleasures. When David Susskind asked record producer Phil Spector what the meaning of the song "Do Doo Ron Ron" was, Spector responded, "It's not what I say it means. It's what it makes you feel! Can't you hear the sound of that record, can't you hear that?" (Marcus 1969, 11-12). What both Spector and his fans knew was that the answer to his question was no. But of course, on the other hand, rock and roll does take itself seriously. Not only is it extremely self-conscious, but it continuously reconstitutes and reencapsulates itself (e.g., in its intertextuality, its self-references, its recreation of its history through the incorporation of "covers," etc.). In fact, it is an essential sign of the popularity of rock and roll that it constantly marks its difference from other musical cultures, whether popular or not. Rock and roll is, from its own side, not merely a subset of "pop," and there must always be music that is not rock and roll. Such "other" music is "co-opted," "sold out," "bubblegum," "family entertainment," and so on. If the power of rock and roll, then, depends not upon meaning but upon affective investments, it is related not so much to what one feels as to the boundary drawn by the very existence of different organizations of desire and pleasure. Its oppositional power is not the result of its offering a particular desire that the dominant culture cannot accept, nor ofthe particular structure of pleasure, nor of its calling for the unlimited realization of desire. Rock and roll need not always offer an ideological critique of the dominant culture, although at some moments it certainly has, aimed at particular repressions as well as the very presence of repression itself. However, rock and roll does not project an antinomy of freedom and constraint, since rock and roll always produces its own constraints on itself and its fans. Its history is rather the deconstruction of that antinomy; it plays with the relation of desire and its regimentation by always circumscribing its own possibilities for the produc-

Another Boring Day in Paradise 39 tion of pleasure. Rock and roll's relation to desire and pleasure serves to mark a difference, to inscribe on the surface of social reality a boundary between "them" and "us"; it constantly rearticulates and recathects a permanent rupture at the point of the intersection of postmodernity, youth, and pleasure. It makes a particular historical moment-and the generations emerging within it-into an apparently permanent rupture. This rupture is accomplished through the production of "affective alliances" that disrupt the hegemonic control of desire and pleasure; in the ideological register, these effects are most visible within the so-called emotional life of its fans. This mark of difference is not, however, a simple boundary between inside and outside, hegemony and revolution. Rock and roll locates its fans as different even while they exist within the hegemony. The boundary is inscribed within the dominant culture. Rock and roll is an insider's art that functions to position its fans as outsiders. This "encapsulation" may sometimes be produced through ideological representations that either explicitly attack the hegemony or define an alternative identity for those living within its affective alliances. But these local considerations too often cloud the general stratification of social space that rock and roll produces: it defines an exteriority for itself inside the dominant culture through particular practices that constitute affective alliances. To use a psychoanalytic metaphor, rock and roll "incorporates" itself into the "belly of the beast." It is "internalised but unintegrated," included within the dominant culture but "alien to it, inaccessible; ... enclosed, entombed, encysted inside" (Nelson 1978, 57-58). Finally, we must ask in what sense this boundary constitutes a political relationship between the rock and roll culture and the hegemony. The most common descriptions of rock and roll's power of affirmation locate it within the attempt to reconstitute community in the face of industrial mass society. Thus if rock and roll apparently begins with private desires, it creates common experiences out of them. For example, rock and roll in the fifties produced a community based upon the shared experiences of teenagers. But it is arguable that the production of this identity-one that always reasserts itself and rebels against older generations of rock and roll fans-is the dismantling rather than the source of rock and roll's political function. The politics of rock and roll is not the production of an identity but the constant struggle against such identities (which could be incorporated by the dominant culture) even as it creates and politicizes them. The source of this tension can be located in the confrontation with postmodernity. Rock and roll transforms the despair

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of its context into an embracing of its possibilities as pleasure. But it cannot dismiss the despair. For what rock and roll is inescapably drawn into is the attempt to find meaning and value in the historical moment and in its own existence. The attempt is, of course, the refusal of postmodernity, of its own postwar context. And so rock and roll seeks new forms of identity, new values and meaning, yet it must always place these back into the context of a world that undermines all meaning and value. For example, it is not simply that youth's sense of loneliness is met with romantic myths of love obviously condemned to failure; it is rather that rock and roll seeks such paths out of postmodernity. And the reality of their immanent failure, the frustration of knowing that they will fail despite our desires, is partly responsible for the real sense of desperation behind the concern for love in pop (e.g., the Beatles, the teenage death songs) and teenage (e.g., Meatloaf) rock and roll. The politics of rock and roll must be understood within this tension, caught between the desire to celebrate the new and the desire to escape it, between despair and pleasure. The politics of rock and roll arises from its articulation of affective alliances as modes of survival within the postmodern world. It does not bemoan the death of older structures but seeks to find organizations of desire that do not contradict the reality in which it finds itself. Rock and roll at its best transforms old dreams into new realities. It rejects that which is outside of its self-encapsulation not on political grounds but because their organizations of affect are no longer appropriate in the postmodern world. It celebrates the life of the refugee, the immigrants with no roots except those they can construct for themselves at the moment, constructions that will inevitably collapse around them. Rock and roll celebrates play-even despairing play-as the only possibility for survival (e.g., Elvis's pink Cadillac, the Beatles' antics, punk's shock tactics, and postpunk's dissonance). It does not oppose its own ideological representations to those of the dominant culture: it locates itself within the gaps and cracks ofthe hegemony, the points at which meaning itself collapses into desire and affect. HYPOTHESIS 3. THE WORK OF ROCK AND ROLL: AFFECTIVE ALLIANCES

The question remains, however, of why rock and roll fans so confidently assumed that Susskind could not "hear" the music. Nor have we acknowledged the existence of boundaries and differences within rock and roll, and its cultures: What one audience takes to be rock and roll, another may dismiss

Another Boring Day in Paradise 41 as co-opted. I want to suggest that a particular music exists as "rock and roll" for an audience only when it is located in a larger assemblage that I will call "the rock and roll apparatus." Within such a context, the music is inflected in ways that empower its specific functioning. The rock and roll apparatus includes not only musical texts and practices but also economic determinations, technological possibilities, images (of performers and fans), social relations, aesthetic conventions, styles of language, movement, appearance and dance, media practices, ideological commitments, and media representations of the apparatus itself. The apparatus describes "cartographies of taste" that are both synchronic and diachronic and that encompass both musical and nonmusical registers of everyday life. For example, not only do particular apparatuses define differing boundaries of "acceptable music," they place different forms of yock and roll in different affective positions; they empower them in different ways. At any moment, rock and roll is constituted by a number of different forms, and while certain forms or conventions may remain common, their effects change in terms of their synchronic and diachronic relations as defined within the apparatus. Furthermore, these positions are always changing as new forms appear and disrupt the musical economy. To treat rock and roll as a set of musical texts whose effects can be read off their surface or be located within the isolated relation between music and fan is already to assume an interpretation of its place within a particular rock and roll apparatus. Instead the music's effects and identity can only be described within the apparatus, which connects particular fragments of the heterogeneous domains of social, cultural, and material practices. It is, then, the rock and roll apparatus that encapsulates itself, that inscribes the difference between "them" and "us." And it is the apparatus that exists as a bricolage through the "excorporation" of hegemonic signs and events. By treating them as fragments, it reinvests them within a different "topography of desire." It would be a mistake, however, to see the apparatus as a passive collection of discrete material events; it is the apparatus itself that is constantly producing ever-changing structures of desire and thus reproducing itself. The rock and roll apparatus organizes the seemingly random collection of cathected events and codes that interpenetrate the rock and roll culture. It is an array of strategies with which youth organizes its affective existence. Such "topographies of desire" might then be described as "affective formations" in order to affirm both their relation and irreducibility to ideological, political, and economic formations.

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The power of the rock and roll apparatus, therefore, lies not mainly in its "theft" of partial objects from the various domains of social life, nor even in the mere fact that it draws lines connecting them. Rather its power lies in its foregrounding and production of particular organizations within and between these fragments. The apparatus is a machine that, in constantly reproducing itself, reshapes our affective life by mapping the vectors of its own economy of desire upon our material life. My claim is that the continuity of rock and roll is constituted by the continued inscription of a threedimensional topography that describes its "affective formation." By operating at this level of abstraction, I am ignoring questions about the specific fragments upon which the apparatus works at a particular moment, as well as the particular inflections these axes of the apparatus may be given at such moments. Rather than looking at particular apparatuses and formations, I want to begin by describing the boundaries ofthe rock and roll apparatus: the moment of its emergence, the possibility of its cessation, the range of its variability, and so forth. The rock and roll apparatus affectively organizes everyday life according to three intersecting axes: (1) youth as difference: the social difference of generations is inscribed upon the phenomenological field of social relations; (2) pleasure of the body: the celebration of pleasure is inscribed upon the site of the body; and (3) postmodernity: the structure of uncertainty (the fragment) is inscribed upon the circuit of history and meaning. I will comment briefly on each of these. Most obviously, the rock and roll apparatus is constructed around the category of youth; and while it is certainly true that "youth" has a number of different ideological inflections, youth is also a material body that can be located socially and historically-a body that is traversed and inscribed both affectively and ideologically. In fact, the rock and roll apparatus has produced a "generational politics" that can be described structurally as a politics of difference and exclusion and substantively as a politics of boredom. As I have argued, rather than defining any necessary identity for its fans, the rock and roll apparatus functions as a boundary that encapsulates its fans and excludes the others. It is this difference that affectively invests the category of youth within the apparatus itself and defines the site of youth culture. The "other" that is excluded from the apparatus is not, however, defined chronologically but rather by a phenomenology of boredom. The rock and roll apparatus institutionalizes a politics defined only by its opposition to boredom as

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the experience of hegemonic reality. The politics of youth celebrates change: the work of the apparatus transforms the very structures of boredom into pleasure. The second affective axis of the rock and roll apparatus involves its celebration of the body as the site of pleasure-in its transformation of identity into style, in the centrality of rhythm and dance, and in its courting of sexuality and sexual practices. The musical practice itself is inserted into the apparatus at the site of the body: it is a music of bodily desire. There is an immediate material relation to the music and its movements. This relation, while true of music in general, is foregrounded in rock and roll. At its simplest level, the body vibrates with the sounds and rhythms, and that vibration can be articulated with other practices and events to produce complex effects. The materiality of music gives it its affective power to translate individuals (an ideological construct) into bodies. This material relation is there, within the apparatus, available to its fans. The body becomes the site at which pleasure is restructured and desire potentially redirected. One might examine, for example, the complex and often contradictory relations between rock and roll and black music in the United States (the fact that it is both so compatible and so distanced at various moments) in terms ofthe changing investments of this axis. Furthermore, it is here that one might try to articulate the possibilities of an oppositional sexual politics within the rock and roll apparatus. Of course, these suggestions are not meant to occlude the relations between the affective formation of the rock and roll apparatus and its position within the ideologically (as well as economically and politically) produced structures of racism and sexism within American society. Clearly, many of the institutional practices of production, marketing, and distribution, as well as patterns of gendered and racial consumption, reinforce and reproduce hegemonic structures of difference and oppression. For example, many of the feminist critiques of rock and roll are quite legitimate. Musical texts and cultures are often quite repressive. Often, such inflections produce their own "pleasure of the emotions" which, most commonly, involve experiences of romance and self-pity. Here the body is reinscribed as the site of selfhood. On the other hand, such critiques cannot justify global condemnations of the affective political possibilities of the rock and roll apparatus. The concrete "politics of pleasure" can only be identified and evaluated contextually. Further, at the level of the affective formation, desire is at least conceptually independent of ideology (in this case, of gender); it is at least difficult to

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maintain that the desires and rhythms of rock and roll are intrinsically gender coded (see the exchange between Catharine A. MacKinnon and Ellen Willis in Nelson and Grossberg 1988). The third axis of the rock and roll apparatus foregrounds the postmodem context within which it emerged. Whether understood as the absence of a future by which we can organize our lives ("The future is a hoax created by high school counselors and insurance salesmen"; "Life is hard and then you die") or of meaning ("Even if there were a meaning to life, I probably wouldn't agree with it," as one of my students said), the rock and roll apparatus is materially structured by this absence of structure. The rock and roll apparatus functions to provide strategies for escaping, denying, celebrating, finding pleasure in-in other words, for surviving within-a postmodem world. This third axis reflexively positions the rock and roll apparatus within its postmodem context and constitutes rock and roll's ambiguity toward its own importance and power. Unlike other forms of popular culture, the "postmodem politics" of rock and roll undermines its claim to produce a stable affective formation. Rather it participates in the production of temporary "affective alliances" that celebrate their own instability and superficiality. While such alliances may apparently make claims to totality within their own moment of empowerment, they are decisively marked by their fluidity and selfdeprecation ("Nothing matters, and what ifit did?" [John Cougar]), and by the ease with which the rock and roll apparatus slides from one alliance into another. In other words, the rock and roll apparatus incorporates and even celebrates the "disposability" of any affective alliance without thereby sacrificing its own claim to existence. The existence of the rock and roll apparatus is, then, precisely in its production of itself as an affective alliance that locates the sites of empowerment between the music and its fans. That is, the rock and roll apparatus affectively organizes the everyday life of its fans by differentially cathecting the various fragments it "excorporates" along these three axes. The result is that it locates, for its fans, the possibilities of intervention and pleasure. It involves the investment of desire in the material world according to vectors (quantities having both magnitude and direction) that are removed from the hegemonic affective formation. It is not that the desires or pleasures themselves are oppositional but rather that the affective investments of the rock and roll apparatus empower its audiences with strategies that, taken topographically, define a level of potential opposition and, often, survival.

Another Boring Day in Paradise 45

HYPOTHESIS 4. THE DIVERSITY OF ROCK AND ROLL

The most commonly observed division within rock and roll (and its fans) is between the punk-violent, sexual, and emotional-and the poet-critical, sensuous, and intellectual. These correspond roughly with the images of working- and middle-class life. In the popular rock press, one finds descriptions and categorizations ofthe different musical styles in rock and roll (e.g., pop, rhythm and blues, art, folk, country, heavy metal, etc.). The concern is often with musical lines of influence. However, it is difficult to see how rock and roll can be circumscribed by any musical characteristics. And the fragmentation of the music has to be complemented by an appreciation of the heterogeneity oflistening practices: styles, contexts, and functions. For example, the same music can be used by different groups (e.g., new wave); different styles can be used for similar functions (e.g., dance music, drug music); and different groups within a common style may yet have different audiences (e.g., Beatles, Ramones, REO Speedwagon, and dB's all use pop conventions; Heart, Styx, and AC/DC are all "heavy metal" bands). There is not "only one way to rock." We can, alternatively, describe the diversity within and the difference of rock and roll on the basis of the considerations of the power and the work of rock and roll advanced above: first, by specifying the ways in which the rock and roll apparatus has cathected a boundary between "them" and "us" through its history; and second, by identifying the vectors that are foregrounded in particular affective alliances. In both cases, I shall have to abstract from the concrete history of the production of local affective alliances. I do not wish to claim, for either of these typologies, that they belong exclusively to rock and roll, or that they limit its future possibilities in predictable ways.

The Inscription of Difference. I propose to construct a two-dimensional schema: the horizontal axis specifies the various structures by which rock and roll differentiates its culture from the other; the vertical axis describes the different affective statuses that rock and roll has assigned to or invested in its own existence. Rock and roll has produced three forms of boundaries: oppositional, alternative, and independent. An oppositional boundary inscribes the fact of dif-

46

ference explicitly; both "us" and "them" are affectively charged. Its effectiveness depends upon the presence ofthe other as an enemy. Thus oppositional rock and roll presents itself as a direct challenge or threat to the dominant culture, perhaps even confronting the power of the dominant culture with its own power. It might be expressed in the phrase "We want the world and we want it now." An alternative boundary is inscribed when the other is only implicitly present. The enemy is negatively charged only as that against which the rock and roll culture differentiates itself. Alternative rock and roll mounts an implicit attack on the dominant culture; the fact of its existence implies a potential substitution for the hegemonic organization of desire: "We want the world but on our terms." An independent boundary is inscribed when the other is effective only by its absence. Independent rock and roll does not present itself as a challenge, either explicitly or implicitly, to the dominant culture, although it may function as such. It apparently exists outside of its relation to the dominant culture; it does not want the world. It seeks to escape, to define a space that neither impinges upon nor is impinged upon by the hegemony: "We want our world." We can represent these three structures of difference, in terms of Us and Them (U and T), as follows: U/T, U/(T), U/( ). Without recognizing these different structures of difference, whatever affirmations rock and roll may produce are likely to be described independently of the particular historical context. While it is possible that some music may consistently produce the same positive affects across different contexts, the effects of the affirmations are bound to change as their particular relations to the dominant culture are differentially cathected. What then is the nature ofthe affirmative affect ofrock and roll? I have argued against seeing it as the representation of identities; the subject-positions articulated by rock and roll are often multiple and contradictory. Rather it defines particular affective statuses for its own culture. By describing itself as a particular structuration of affect, rock and roll locates social subjects in a nonrepresentational space. One can identify three such self-cathexes: visionary, experiential, and critical. These are, essentially, self-attributions; they describe different forms of affective alliances, modes of affectively relating to and surviving within the world. Again, it is not the content of the particular affirmation that is effective (although ideological representation may play an important role) but the status that it assigns to the existence of its own desires. Visionary rock and roll projects itself as a utopian practice. Its power derives from its claim to be a stable structure of desire. The particular rock and

Another Boring Day in Paradise 47 roll culture lives out-in its music-the possibility of a moment of stability in the face of change and regimentation. Whether the real audience succeeds in actualizing its utopian possibility and the particular content of the vision are only secondary. The affective and political power of the music depends upon its constituting itself as something more than just a mode of survival, as a vision of a potentially permanent affective alliance. Experiential rock and roll is more modest; it projects itself not as a necessary mode of survival but only as a viable possibility in the present context. It valorizes its own affirmation of change and movement. The alliances that it organizes are at best temporary respites. It celebrates the behaviors and images of its own youth cultures (e.g., driving, dancing, sexuality, rhythm), which deny both regimentation and the possibility of stability. Its affirmation is only in the very pleasure of the music, in engulfing oneself within the musical context, in participating within the practices of youth culture. Such an affirmation tends to be neither as optimistic and pretentious as the visionary, nor as pessimistic and selfdestructive as the critical. A critical affirmation refuses even the claim that it can produce temporary spaces within which the audience might control and make sense of its life. By rejecting any possibility of stability and valueincluding that implied by the valorization of change itself-it undermines its own status as a viable mode of survival. It affirms and valorizes only its own negativity. Its status as pleasurable depends upon its status as the only response to the reality of post modernity. All that can be affirmed is the practice of critique, the deconstruction of all affective alliances, including that produced by its own inscription of the difference between them and us. The affirmation of critical rock and roll is a self-reflexive affirmation of difference, a decathexis of any affirmation. The matrix of "stances" that these two dimensions generate (see Fig. 1) describes the possibilities of an affective politics offered by rock and roll. It is not a description of musical styles nor of a group's intentions. Further, no group or style can be stably located within a category; groups can play with a number of stances simultaneously (e.g., the Clash). The affective stance of particular music is, as I have emphasized, locally produced. It may depend on a wide range of determinants, including the image of the band and different degrees of knowledge of the lyrics (rock and roll fans often "float" in and out of the lyrics). Fans of different musics (e.g., punk and heavy metal) often place a great weight on what appear as minute musical differences to outsiders. The ways in which one listens to music, as well as the music one

48 NEGATION Oppositional

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